Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

Agreeing with Anne Applebaum tends to worry me. Her book Gulag is well regarded (Pulitzer Prize, for example), but I found that the closer it got to the present day and events that I knew a fair amount about, the more tendentious and rightward-slanted I thought her account. That made me uncertain about the earlier parts of the book. She’s published a large amount of reporting and opinion, which in my view also ranges from further right than I agree with to tendentious misreading of events and deliberate misconstruing opposing positions. But credit where credit is due: in Autocracy, Inc. she offers a clear-eyed assessment of the kleptocratic dictators who rule numerous and occasionally important countries, and who would like to extend their influence over a much greater swathe of the world. Some are notionally leftist, such as Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela; others are unabashedly rightist, such as Vladimir Putin; traits that they share include contempt for liberal democracy, commitment to using state resources for personal enrichment, indifference to the lives of their countries’ citizens, and a willingness to support and learn from fellow autocrats.

Autocracy, Inc. zips through the background, examples and ideas in 150 pages. In the book’s final 25 pages, Applebaum describes what she thinks citizens can do to stop Autocracy Incorporated. This brevity and directness are two of the book’s virtues. Though it describes how global interdependence has been turned into a weapon by this era’s autocrats, it is not a scholarly tome, nor even an accessible version of academic work on the subject. While I think Oilver Bullough is a better storyteller, his two books on autocracy-adjacent subjects — Moneyland and Butler to the World — have a more narrow focus. Applebaum is painting the big picture. Further, both of Bullough’s books pre-date Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That war has tightened connections among the autocrats and sped up their learning, and Applebaum’s account is a better description of the current situation.

Applebaum gives her readers one of the key insights right at the beginning: contemporary dictators are no longer stand-alone villains. Though there is no overarching ideology as there was among Communists during the Cold War, the autocrats work with each other for mutual benefit. They may be more a syndicate than a corporation, but the different branches of Autocracy Inc. know they have more in common with each other than any of them do with liberal democracies, and they act on that knowledge. That makes overturning any one of them difficult for strictly domestic opposition.

The Belarusian and Venezuelan dictators are widely despised within their own countries. Both would lose free elections, if such elections were ever held. Both have powerful opponents: the Belarusian and Venezuelan opposition movements have been led by a range of charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have inspired their fellow citizens to rake risks, to work for change, to come out onto the streets in protest. In August 2020, more than a million Belarusians, out of a population of only ten million, protested in the streets against stolen elections. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans repeatedly participated in protests across the country too.
If their only enemies had been the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime or the brutal, ugly Belarusian regime, these protest movements might have won. But there were not fighting autocrats only at home; they were fighting autocrats around the world who control state companies in multiple countries and who can use them to make investment decisions worth billions of dollars. They were fighting that can buy security cameras from China or [online] bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they were fighting against rulers who long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity. (pp. 4–5)

The Soviets, Applebaum writes, at least pretended to be advancing a superior form of society, and to care what the rest of humanity thought, even if only to eventually bring the revolution to them. Today’s autocrats don’t care. There are different forms of not caring: in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, leaders stand purely for holding on to power and money; in Iran they discount the views of those they deem infidels; in Cuba and Venezuela vestigial communist ideas lead to calling external criticism an imperialist plot; in China and Russia they deploy civilizational arguments to claim Western ideas do not apply to them. While autocrats and the regimes’ servants work together, they are isolated from large swathes of their own populations. At the extreme, Applebaum writes quoting democracy activist Srdja Popovic, they are “willing to see their country enter the category of failed states” (p. 7) rather than share or lose power. She cites Maduro and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus as examples of this kind of ruler. She also puts Bashar al-Assad in this group as the book was published before his overthrow demonstrated that autocracy is not immovable.

Subsequent chapters describe how corruption strengthens autocracy, and how much of that corruption is supported and enabled by Western companies and organizations. She draws on Bullough’s work among others, a reminder of how appallingly some of Western countries’ highly-compensated lawyers, banker and corporate advisers are willing to behave as long as those big bills get paid.

When Applebaum writes about the media environment that enables autocrats, she makes the key point that they do not push a single point of view. In fact, they do not particularly care what single story people believe about an important issue or event. Multiple competing versions obscure the truth and make it harder to identify. Thus in 2014 when Russian missiles brought down a Dutch airliner flying over Ukraine, killing 298 people including 80 children, Russia-based and Russia-aligned media, along with a plethora of online actors began flooding the information space with all manner of stories. There had been a collision. There had been Ukrainian missiles. Other planes had been involved. Ukrainian interceptors had downed the plane and were covering up their involvement.

This tactic, the so-called “fire hose of falsehoods” produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world. (p. 79)

The antidote is to insist on truth. Democrats have to work together; the autocrats already are. (Benjamin Franklin would have appreciated the sentiment about hanging together.) In international policy, isolationism and realism are temptations to be avoided. The world is interdependent whether anyone wants it to be or not, and pretending otherwise will weaken a country and diminish its citizens’ lives. Realism, the idea that countries have “eternal interests and permanent geopolitical orientations” is no less pernicious

not least because it appeals to the indifferent. If nations never change, then of course we don’t need to exert the effort to make them change. If nations have permanent orientations, then all we need to do is discover what those are and get used to them. If nothing else, the Ukraine war showed us that nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. Their behavior can be altered by acts or cowardice or bravery, by brave leaders and cruel ones, and above all by good ideas and bad ones. Their interactions are not inevitable; their alliances and enmities are not permanent. There was not a coalition to aid Ukraine until February 2022, and then there was. That coalition then made what appeared the inevitable, rapid conquest of Ukraine impossible. By the same token, a different kind of Russian leader, with a different set of ideas, could now end the war quickly. (p. 175)

The future is as yet unwritten, and it can belong to the democrats not to the autocrats.